Kanye West Enters Academia With New Textbook

If society needed anymore proof that Kanye West fans have an overly inflated opinion of the man that can only be rivalled by his own, and that people in academia spend a lot of time dissecting things that don’t matter, may we present to you Julius Bailey‘s The Cultural Impact of Kanye West.

The 300-plus-page textbook, due out 6th March in the US, compiles 14 essays on the socio-political, aesthetic, and even economic underpinnings of the music of Kanye West, curated by the man who edited a collection of essays on Jay-Z and is considered the ambassador for hip-hop scholarship.

According to the synopsis, the book is an in-depth analysis of the “moral and social implications of West’s words, images and music in the broader context of Western civilization’s preconceived ideas” and “how West both challenges religious and moral norms and propagates them.”

The work is broken up into three obtusely-labeled sections, respectively titled Revisiting the Pharmakon: Artistic Gifts / Human Complexities, Unpacking Hetero-normativity and Complicating Race and Gender, and Theorizing the Aesthetic, the Political and the Existential.

Chapters include Kanye Omari West: Visions of Modernity, When Apollo and Dionysus Clash: A Nietzschean Perspective on the Work of Kanye West, and everyone’s favourite, Confidently (Non)cognizant of Neoliberalism: Kanye West and the Interruption of Taylor Swift.

(Via Consequence of Sound)

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